oooo, great timing - I have a couple of eggplant in the fridge. you dip them in just beaten egg, yes? and don't cook them other than in the whole melange?

I dry them, flour them, egg them, breadcrumb/parm mix.

I fry them in a cast iron pan at 425°F for about 5 minutes, flip them onto a pizza stone to dry and crisp the other side.

hm. i have no pizza stone. still, i imagine i can improvise.

i've made some pretty good ratatouilles, but i must confess i have this weird objection to zucchini. so if i get zucchini in my csa box, i am willing to buy eggplant to make ratatouille, but if i get eggplant, i just can't bring myself to spend good money on zucchini. yes, this makes no sense (particularly since i like yellow squash).

what i really want to learn to make is caponata. i should get a jar from trader joe's and try to recreate it.

or i can just give in to my lust for tomato sauce and nice gooey mozzarella and go for the parm._________________aka: neverscared!

I cook up some oats in milk and then sweeten it with some of that delicious local honey I've become addicted to, then top it off with a few generous dollops of (natural) peanut butter.
Sometimes I skip the honey and use a large spoonful of Nutella before adding the PB. That gets me over the rough times when there are no cookies in the house.

The paste-ified peanuts and the oats together provide a good source of complete protein (as does the milk by itself). Peanuts and natural peanut butter are also loaded with anti-oxidants if you put stock in that stuff, not to mention being a good source of healthy fats and contributing more fiber to the meal, plus promoting a better cholesterol balance.
Oh yeah, and the flavors of oats, honey, and peanut butter work really well together.

Hmm, I wonder how some shredded coconut mixed into that would be._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

The dollar tree cookie sheets are pretty good, just as long as you dry them directly after cleaning. Otherwise they become rusty horrors.

I found an anniversary reprint of the original 1950s Betty Crocker cookbook. I mostly wanted to see if they had recipes for ribbon loaf sandwiches and aspic, as well as other odd things that I'd like some proof people ate (Or at least that people made.) Inside this book are so many weird gems - not just the recipes, but also a large amount of references to the ancient Romans, smorgasboards and George Washington, as well as little ditties and side tangents about how a coat of arms for the US should include pie as its main symbol.

Clean a large cabbage. Curl outer leaves back from top. Cut out center; hollow it out about 6" deep. Place a sterno lamp in the cavity (lamp hidden, but flame should come almost to top of cabbage.) Place cabbage on serving plate. Surround with a frill of parsley. Thrust wooden picks through cocktail sausages, and stick into the cabbage. Stick an olive onto end of each (to protect fingers from flame.) Guests broil their own sausages._________________[Stripeypants has enabled lurk mode.]

I really want to save that recipe and use it some day if I'm ever forced to feed people I hate. I'll be like "This is one of those amazing old recipes, I just don't know why people don't still make it."

Oh god oh god, Stripey I think you just gave me an idea for a really awful fic you should never inspire me to write horrible things happen._________________Samsally the GrayAce

I really want to save that recipe and use it some day if I'm ever forced to feed people I hate. I'll be like "This is one of those amazing old recipes, I just don't know why people don't still make it."

Oh god oh god, Stripey I think you just gave me an idea for a really awful fic you should never inspire me to write horrible things happen.

Awesome! Iwill write up the other aspic suggestions for you, because inspiration!

Don't forget people used to put pretty much anything in aspic. Lettuce. Eggs. Meat. It looks horrifying. I'd probably eat it because I used to enjoy eating the jellied broth out of vienna sausage cans.

We joke around here about suspending things in aspic, then presenting it as a conceptual piece named "Pathogen." Feel free to use that._________________[Stripeypants has enabled lurk mode.]

i will have you know, whelp, that i used to have a recipe for a tomato and cottage cheese aspic that was _excellent_, and i was devastated to lose it. i still periodically try to find something similar on the internet. it was not only tasty (dude, have you never had a bloody mary? it's like a bloody mary you can chew (except without the alcohol)), it was quite striking - you made a layer of cottage cheese in aspic (no tomato juice), and then topped it with a layer of the tomato aspic. the lovely, tomato-ey, with-just-a-touch-of-lemon-and-grated-onion-for-bite tomato aspic. and then you turned it out from the mold, so you had this white-capped mound of tomato aspic. lovely.

hmpf.

if you really want horrors, you want to look up old Jell-o recipe books. i have one from circa 1968. it uses jell-o's fruit-flavored gelatins, and every single one of them (the recipes) included some salt, which really just kind of makes fruit jello taste nasty. but you can put just about anything and everything in jello. (you should look up perfection salad - i have yet to discover what, exactly, it is the perfection of (certainly not salad)).

i can vouch for this from experience. i did my graduate research at a biological station on the texas-oklahoma border which also held classes during the summer, when all meals were provided by the station. the cooks were a couple of middle-aged-to-elderly ladies, of the dimensions my mother used to describe as "5 by 5"s, who had probably spent their entire lives in small-town oklahoma, and just about every single lunch and dinner included a jello salad (we were spared at breakfast). twice a day, a parade of brightly colored jiggly blocks filled with canned fruit, assorted vegetables, marshmallows, clumps of cream cheese - one of my friends swore it once included vienna sausages (they were also a regular on the lunch menu, swimming in some sort of liquid sauce. by the way, should you find yourself seeking sustenance in rural oklahoma, these are pronounced "VI-eener"). one never looked at it too carefully, lest one in fact be able to identify a previous day's leftovers.

never tasty tomato aspic, however. i wonder how far back the l.a. times food archive goes? i'm pretty sure i cut that out of the times....._________________aka: neverscared!

I think vienna sausages might not be too bad in aspic, but that's just me and my weird taste. And I'm sure that some of the salads could be made well. I've had a jello dish that was topped with cheddar cheese and some other things, and it was tasty.

I do not think that cheese aspic should be a thing, though. It sounds like it would be watered down and rubbery and just utterly gross.

One time I made a jello-ish monstrosity that was made mostly with corn starch, sugar, water and a little lemon. So it had a lemon flavor, but the texture was bizarre. I also colored it blue - but not a nice bright sciency blue, instead it was more a watered down "That is not now nor ever has been food" blue. No one ate it but me, even when I cut it out into fun shapes._________________[Stripeypants has enabled lurk mode.]

well, if you like chilled beef consomme, you can probably handle most meat products in aspic. the cottage cheese in aspic was actually ok, but cottage cheese is a bit different from all other cheeses. also, that part had grated onion in it, so it had its own flavor impact._________________aka: neverscared!